“It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”
“And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?”
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”
“And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.”
“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”
“All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.”
“It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.”
“What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined. Go out; break things. Go further; repair them. Break hundreds of hearts. Have thousands of children. Discover awe in a tangle of weeds; find delight in the pattern of a roll of mass-produced paper towels; live, Reader, live; live as hard as I died, and only then I will be happy.”
“I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house.”
“Negotiations with the locals have gone sufficiently well –now that Portia and her party have established their superiority –and the incumbents have lent the three travellers a male to serve as a guide in the lands to the north.”
“All right. Maybe I can get you one soul. Perhaps a tax collector...'cept they ain't human. Would they work? Or would you need, like, three of them to make up one normal person's soul? -Lift”
“Behold, the hand of the Mighty One of Jacob, what it accomplishes while we are silent, suffer, and pray. Is not the word of Moses true: “You will be silent and the Lord will fight for you”?”
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